I was using the past tense to talk about the future as if it had already happened. I think if you read the whole piece you could see clearly I was talking about things that had not yet happend. Sort of like the Ghost of Christmas Future. We can already see that the US can't easily impose its will on a country like Iraq, and that will be an education for the rest of the world. Follow my reasoning (I recapitulate from the past three posts):
1. The only actual forces working against the US's occupation and destruction of Iraq come from the Iraqi people. People who thought that France and Germany's opposition amounted to much of anything need only look at Afghanistan. What are they doing there besides propping up US hegemony while trying to make a NATO-ized EU fit into it? But is there a pattern here that says something is happening in the Death Star system?
Pashtun Afghanistan continues to resist. Chavez's Venezuela has successfully resisted the US's efforts to change the government there. Colombia is totally tested territory. Cuba is still there, as is Guantanamo. After everyone told the Iraqis to stay down, they stood up and said NO. Is it possible that this indeed is a turning point?
2. 1998-2004. US forces expanded worldwide, even as the finances and faith in those finances became increasingly BRITTLE. It's an era of an incredibly weak dollar, very expensive oil (consider the Economist headlined an oil glut in 1999), unemployment troubles, retirement troubles. And the dynamic US, model for workforce flexibility and job growth (which was supposed to be a tradeoff for not even having an OECD-type social welfare system), doesn't look very dynamic at all. Even the Europeans can see that now.
3. Let's suppose that violent opposition in Iraq really does get the US to leave. Or let's suppose even if it doesn't get them to leave, it keeps them from expanding their conflicts with Syria, Iran, Libya, Sudan, N. Korea, Cuba and Venezuela. Then some sort of tide has turned, and it's a few thousand rag-tag insurgents in Iraq, plus the Pashtun of Afghanistan, and Chavez and his oil, who started it off.
4. Multilateralism went out of the picture under Clinton. The only thing left for that multilateralism was concerted military action if the US led. That came to an end with the invasion and occupation of Iraq. The US and the EU hope they can patch things up later, with Afghanistan as their joint project, but I predict it won't work. For a start, in many ways, the occupation and state puppetry of Afghanistan is a more unviable mess than Allawi's Iraq.
5. Now all it's going to take is a global capitalist loss of faith in US finance and monetary policies.
So, now is the start of the Bushwa test to see just how flexible and adaptive US hegemony really is. Recall that the first US-led attack on Iraq played out domestically in the US as a way for the national security state to rid itself of the Vietnam legacy. The Clinton era warfare was supposed to justify the US as the global policeman of a US-dominated global system of economy, finance, governance, education, etc. The Bush era warfare is about expanding US military power worldwide so that....????....???I'm not sure what the goal is, except somehow a militarily dominant and expanding US is supposed to be a global empire and also a sister 'Masada complex state', with a former global empire, the UK, and Israel as its closest allies and mentors. Is it possible that the US has finally got it self so out of synch with the rest of the planet, that something is going to happen?
F
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